Starling House, page 19
But I didn’t know I’d been cleaning his fucking house for four months. I didn’t know I’d betrayed him and bled for him and kissed him, that one day he would be on his knees, neck bowed, eyes closed, speaking in a voice like a shovel biting into earth.
So: I run. Just like he said I would.
The hall is short and straight, but the front door is locked. I rattle the knob and the house moans at me. “Don’t.” My voice sounds thick and wet; I think I must be crying. “Please.”
The door opens.
I run down the steps and along the drive, ribs aching, the gravel leaving teeth marks in my feet. I slip out the front gates and circle wide around his truck. I don’t want to think about the truck or the phone number, the too-high pay, the too-nice coat—so many things I thought were gifts, but which strike me now as desperate attempts to pay down a blood debt. But he’s shit out of luck, because my mother was worth more than he could afford. She was feckless and foolish and beautiful, she drank and she lied and she had a laugh like the Fourth of July and I needed her.
I’ve never stopped. I tried to cross her off my list that night in the river, but if I ran my fingers across the page I know I could still feel the shape of her name, indelible.
By the time I get back to the motel the sky is the color of old denim and the stars are faded flecks of bleach. The crickets have screamed themselves out and the only sound is the river, like the static between radio stations.
My feet hurt. My chest hurts. My eyes hurt. I feel like an open wound, a bruise.
The Underland is still lying open on my bed, bristling with ghosts and beasts. I crawl onto Jasper’s mattress instead.
I dream of Starling House again—an endless, arterial map of hallways and open doors, stairs and balustrades—and I’m grateful. At least I’m not dreaming of the river.
* * *
I’ve never really had the chance to wallow. Wallowing is an indulgence you can’t afford if you have thirty dollars left in your checking account and a baby brother watching you like you’re his personal sun, sure to rise. But now I find myself jobless and aimless, with no one counting on me and nowhere to be, so I figure: screw it. I wallow like I’m making up for lost time, like I’m going for the gold in self-pity.
I burrow deep into Jasper’s bed and spend three days in a sweaty cave of sheets and stale deodorant. I wake up to eat and piss and shower, and afterward I sit wrapped in my towel for so long it leaves bumpy pink imprints on the backs of my legs. I watch the tidal motions of the sun across the floor. I study the alluvial stains on the ceiling. I dig my fingers into my bruised ribs, thinking of other, gentler hands, and then I close my eyes and bully myself into a restless sleep.
I dream, and every dream is a bad one. The mist rises. The house falls. Arthur follows the Beasts down and down, just like I told him to, and I wake with wet cheeks. Sometimes I wish I hadn’t told him; sometimes I wish I’d fed him to the Beasts myself.
My phone buzzes every now and then, like a carpenter bee thumping senselessly against a window. I look at the screen the first couple of times, but it’s just the library letting me know my holds are available, or Jasper saying he’s spending another night at Logan’s (fuck Logan), or Elizabeth Baine asking if I received her message. That last one almost provokes an emotion, so I shove the phone under the mattress. I figure if they’re good enough to find my real birth certificate, then surely they can figure out that I’m not working at Starling House anymore.
Eventually the phone goes quiet.
A distant, rational part of me thinks: You know she won’t give up that easy. She’ll never give up, because she’s like me: willing to break every rule and cross every line to get what she needs. An urgency moves through me, a desire to call Arthur, warn him about her—
But then I think of the river. The mud under my nails. The cold place in my chest. I think of all our other close calls and bad nights. All Jasper’s ambulance rides and steroid shots, the ugly bike crashes and the time I tangled my foot in old fishing line and nearly drowned. The time Jasper chased a stray dog into the woods and a hunter’s bullet missed him so narrowly it left a purple welt on his right ear.21
I think about cursed towns and cursed families. I think: Above everyone else, they’ll go after Gravely blood.
I don’t think anything after that.
* * *
On the third day a fist slams against the room 12 door with an aggression suggesting I am about to be dragged off by men in jackboots.
“Hey kid, you dead?” Bev sounds as if she doesn’t care much either way, but wants to know if she’ll have to rent a steam cleaner. I wonder if she’s already planning to add me to her list of ghost stories—the girl who died of a broken heart and stank up room 12. The meathead who still haunts the motel.
More thumping. “I turned the internet off two hours ago. What’s going on?” There’s a strained note in her voice, perilously close to concern, that sends something white-hot licking up my spine.
I thrash out of bed and whip open the door so fast that Bev says, “Jesus H.—”
“Did you know?” My voice sounds like it’s coming out of a rusted gutter pipe.
She squints at me, hands on her hips. “You look like hot hell. You been eating right? Not that gas station garba—”
“Did you know?”
A flash of wariness, covered by flat irritation. “Did I know what?”
It takes me a second to unwedge the words from the small, dim place I’ve been keeping them. “Did you know her last name? My name?”22
Bev doesn’t answer, but she goes very still. My cheeks sting as if I’ve been slapped. “You did. The whole time, and you never—” I stop speaking before my voice can do anything embarrassing, like crack or wobble.
Bev scrubs her hand hard over her face and says, “Hon, everybody knew.” She sounds almost gentle. I wonder how bad I must look, to squeeze pity out of Bev. “Everybody knew Old Leon Gravely, and everybody knew his little girl. The day she got that Corvette was the last day of peace and quiet in this town.”
I swallow the phrase everybody knew. It ricochets around inside me, bruising bones. “Did Charlotte know?” The question feels desperately important.
Bev shakes her head quickly. “I never said anything, and she didn’t grow up around here.”
A tiny ray of relief, that at least one person in my life wasn’t lying to me. I lick cracked lips. “So then do you know why my mom didn’t—how she wound up here?”
“Your mama had a wild streak a mile wide. Eventually I guess she finally crossed the line and her daddy threw her out. She dropped out of school, left town, and when she came back—there you were. With that Gravely hair.” Bev’s eyes flick up to my greasy red curls.
“And Old Leon.” The man in the mansion, the reason there’s no luna moths or unions in Muhlenberg County. My granddaddy. “He didn’t take her back?”
Bev shakes her head once. “He might have, if she turned respectable, begged a little bit. But your mama was stubborn.”
She says it admiringly, but it sounds to me like Mom was just a rich-kid rebel, one of those spoiled children that break rules out of boredom. And then she wound up with two kids and too much pride to ask for help. Instead, she taught us to scrabble and steal. She raised us in parking lots and motel rooms, hungry and lonely, chased by Beasts we couldn’t see.
And nobody in this whole damn town did anything about it. They turned their backs and looked away, just like they always have and always will.
Even Bev, who could have told me the truth anytime, who I trusted.
She’s not looking at me now, tonguing the tobacco in her jaw. “Listen, I should have—”
“Did Charlotte bring my library holds by?” My voice is cool, serene.
I see Bev flinch a little from whiplash. “Charlotte’s not—” She clears her throat, falls back into her usual aggression. “If you want your smut you’ll have to walk your ass over to the library just like everybody else.”
“Okay,” I say calmly, and then I slam the door in her face.
“Opal, hey, come on.” I hear her feet shuffling on the other side of the door. “Fine, be like that. But I’m not turning the internet back on until you take out the trash.”
Her boots scuff the pavement as she stomps away.
I go all the way under, after that. No longer drifting but diving down, kicking hard toward the riverbed. I lose track of the days and nights, existing in the changeless twilight of deep water. I don’t have to dream because I never sleep; I don’t have to think because I never wake up.
At some point, the door opens. I don’t roll over, but I can smell the warm blacktop of the parking lot, feel the aggrieved tumble of air disturbed after a long stillness. I hear Jasper’s voice. “Hey,” he says, and then, after a while, “Okay, whatever.”
I think he leaves then, but he comes back later, and then again. He gets louder and more annoying each time. Opal, are you sick? Opal, what’s wrong with you? I feel like one of those eyeless fish who lives in the deep pools of Mammoth Cave, too canny to be caught and dragged out into the light. I stay safe and deep, even when I feel the ghastly chill of blankets torn away, even when I hear the shift in his voice, the teenage crack at the end of my name. Opal, what the fuck? Opal, why are your ribs that color?
He keeps at it for a while, but eventually he gives up and leaves me to decompose in peace. Some small, wakeful part of me wants to feel sad about that—is this how it feels, to be crossed off somebody’s list?—but most of me is relieved. It’s easier to fall apart when no one is watching you.
* * *
Arthur Starling becomes aware—gradually, in reluctant stages—that someone is watching him. His first clue was the nervy shiver at the back of his skull that told him there was a stranger on Starling land. He ignored this on the grounds that it was impossible, as he was in possession of all the keys again, and as the only person who could theoretically gain entry without a key was never coming back.
His second clue was the physical sound of his front door opening. He had ignored this on similar grounds. The House had been displeased since Opal left—none of the faucets worked and the windows were all jammed, and everything in the fridge had molded to spiteful green sludge overnight—but it wouldn’t yet betray him by opening for his enemies. And, furthermore, Arthur had been drinking with such unflagging dedication that he was simultaneously still drunk and already hungover, and couldn’t be sure he’d heard anything in the first place.
His third clue is the sound of a bourbon bottle shattering several inches away from his head. This, he finds, he cannot ignore.
Arthur opens his eyes—a process not dissimilar from prying open a pair of crusted paint cans—to find himself on the library floor, which is something of a surprise. The afternoon air is gluey and hot because none of the windows will open, and there’s a young man watching him. Glossy curls, rangy brown limbs, a surplus of eyelashes. There’s nothing even slightly familiar about him—except for his expression.
Only one person has ever regarded Arthur with that particular canny, cornered-animal fury.
“Oh God, there’s another one.” The words come out smeary and flat, which tells Arthur that his face is still adhered to the floorboards. He closes his eyes again and hopes Opal’s little brother will leave, or perhaps dissipate, like a bad dream.
A second bottle hits the floor, a little closer.
“Is there something,” Arthur asks the floor, “I can do for you?”
“I’d say ‘die in a ditch,’ but it looks like you’re halfway there.”
From the way she talked about him, Arthur had formed an idea that Jasper was a sheltered, delicate creature, in need of constant protection. But he is, in fact, a sharp and resentful sixteen-year-old from Muhlenberg County, whom everyone else needs protection from.
Arthur detaches himself from the floor in unpleasant stages, pausing several times to reacquaint his stomach with vertical gravity. Eventually he achieves a slouched sitting position, his back braced by a bookshelf, and tries again. “Why are you here?”
Jasper, who had apparently grown bored while Arthur wormed himself upright, is leaning over a desk, perusing Arthur’s notes and folders. They’re in a state of fantastic disarray, folders emptied, papers crumpled, his yellow notepad teetering precariously on the edge with half its pages torn out. Arthur has an embarrassing suspicion that he removed them in a fit of impotent temper.
“Opal left her favorite hoodie here,” Jasper says, without looking away from the desk.
Arthur grunts. “Your sister’s a better liar.”
“Yeah, but I’m smarter.” Jasper looks away from the notes and meets Arthur’s eyes, flatly threatening. “I came to tell you to leave her alone.”
Arthur feels infinitely too old for this conversation, and also too drunk, too sober, and too wretched. “I’ve been trying. You’re the ones who keep turning up at my House.”
“Tell it to leave us alone, too.”
Arthur is about to reply that if he could make the House behave as he liked then Jasper wouldn’t be standing in his library, when the plural pronoun penetrates the haze of nausea. He forces both his eyes to focus on Jasper—lean and dangerous in the afternoon light, brave or stupid enough to face a monster for his sister’s sake—and repeats, softly, “Us?”
Opal would have smiled or lied or cheated her way out of the question. Jasper just lowers his head, a boy with the bit in his teeth, and ignores it. “She’s not eating. She’s not sleeping. I don’t even think she’s reading.” The slightest, most awful break in his voice. “I’ve never seen her like this.”
The weight that has been hovering above Arthur for days now—the suffocating guilt he’s been holding off with sheer volume of alcohol—descends upon him then. It lands like cannon shot, smashing through him. “Is she—someone should look at her ribs—” He hears an unhealthy wheeze in his own voice, swallows twice. “Is she alright?”
Jasper is perfectly cold, not scathing so much as searing. “It’s none of your business, because you’re never going to speak to her again, are you?” Jasper steps closer, crouching among the glittering teeth of broken bottles until his face is level with Arthur’s. “I don’t know what happened. But if I see another bruise on my sister, I’ll know who to blame.”
It occurs to Arthur, with the painful clarity that follows a long period of stupidity, that Jasper would be entirely correct to blame him. The mist could have risen any night in the past week and the Beasts would have found the Warden insensate, mired in self-pity. They would have been free to roam as they liked, sowing their bad seeds, perhaps sinking their teeth into a pale throat, raking their claws across a freckled face.
The fumes from the bourbon bottles make Arthur suddenly, violently sick.
Jasper watches impassively. He stands, looking down at Arthur with a disgusted, almost pitying expression, before turning away. His shoes crunch across the glass.
“Jasper.” Arthur’s eyes are closed, his head propped against the bookcase. “You should leave. Get out of Eden.”
Jasper turns slowly back, hands jammed deep in his pockets. Arthur can see the outline of fists through the denim, but his voice is flat and bored. “People have told me that my whole life, you know that? People who love me, people who hate me. All of them seem to agree that I don’t belong here.”
Arthur begins a garbled, embarrassed denial but Jasper cuts him off. “The hilarious thing, the real fucking joke of it all, is that my family’s been here longer than any of them, and they know it. I think it drives them crazy, actually.”
Arthur tries to imagine how the son of a part-time dealer living in a motel and a migrant worker could have a claim on that kind of old Kentucky legacy; he fails. “What do you mean?”
“Opal always got by on forgeries and bullshit and everyone feeling sorry for her, and never once wondered what it was like for me to walk around with faked papers. I used to have these nightmares…” Jasper’s flat affect has cracked. Through the fault lines, Arthur sees something familiar: a lonely, tired boy who is too young to have this many secrets. “But did you know if you write the Department of Health they’ll email you an index of every birth certificate in the county? If Opal had ever really wanted to know where Mom came from, she could’ve figured it out, too.”
He asks, carefully, “And where did your mom come from?”
“The same place everything in this town comes from.” And then Arthur knows, oh Jesus, why didn’t he guess? No wonder the mist had risen so often this spring; no wonder Opal and her brother had such accursed luck. The only surprise is that their mother made it as long as she did.
Jasper shrugs, a hard jerk of his shoulders. “The goddamn Gravelys.”
Arthur pushes the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, pressing until fireworks burst in the black. “Jasper. You have to get out of this town. Now. Tonight.”
“I literally just told you how sick I am of hearing that.”
“You don’t understand. The Beasts—the curse—” Arthur pauses to reflect on all the poor life choices that led him here, sitting in his own sick, speaking freely of his family’s secrets to a boy who wants him dead, or at least maimed. He swallows. “Haven’t you ever wondered why no Gravely stays longer than a night or two in this town? Even if they don’t know the whole truth, they know what happens to the ones who stay.”
Jasper’s eyes have widened, very slightly. Arthur can almost see the machinery of his mind working, recalling every near-miss and brutal accident, all the times the mist rose and he felt the weight of black eyes on the nape of his neck.
Then Arthur watches him gather it all up and shove it someplace cold and private. He arranges a sneer on his face. “You think it’s news to me, how much my life has sucked?”
